Product Design Muscles

At WWDC 2013 Jony Ive said “We have always thought about design as being so much more than just the way something looks. It's the whole thing: the way something works on so many different levels. Ultimately, of course, design defines so much of our experience,” and while it’s true the design industry has made great progress on educating people outside of our fields on the principal of design being more than just how something looks, it’s harder to grasp that Product Design is a discipline that requires us to build and maintain certain mental “muscles” to be able to do our work.

Simone Pellegrini, Unsplash

Thinking

Don Norman’s The Design Of Everyday Things — an essential text on Product Design — has  famous anecdotes about doors and light switches. In it, Norman discusses the frustration of living in a world of poor design choices made by other people. I would argue that every moment that a product designer is interacting with the interfaces and products in their lives, some level of design thinking is occurring. We spend our days wading through digital interfaces to text our loved ones, check how much money we ~don’t~ have left in our checking accounts, and physically interact with tiny computers that we strap to our wrists and place in our ears. These experiences are unremarkable in isolation, but add up over time.

When we encounter the unexpected — we feel frustrated at what’s happening. Once the feeling of frustration passes, we can find ourselves trying to mentally think through designing solutions or alternatives. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has written about how our brains try to use energy as efficiently as possible, and how we’re running something of a simulation of our daily lives. Only when something important or unexpected happens, do we actually pay attention. These moments of attention are an opportunity for us to practice our design thinking. That extra-useless error message, or time when you can’t remember where a button is, or even when your new pair of headphones don’t fit comfortably, we can make useful the sense of “that’s not how this is suppose to work!”

Humans have been around far longer than language. We’ve evolved abilities to communicate with each other non-verbally. If you were to ask most digital product designers to render a button quickly, you would likely find that our natural proclivity would be to draw some type of short, wide rectangle, with a text label placed around the center of it. This isn’t an accident. No one went to button school. Instead we naturally assemble some amalgamation of the hundreds of buttons we might encounter in our typical day. We’re exposed to something new, and it stands out — just like that error message or ill-fitting headphones — and we think about it. Then we start to imagine it in applying to problems we’re trying to solve.

When we face periods of more deliberate thinking – like getting into a room with a whiteboard, or sitting with a blank notepad open – There might also be other people with us with the explicit goal of trying to solve a problem. This can feel overwhelming, and developing your thinking muscles outside of these situations, can help you feel more prepared for sharing and presenting your own ideas, and collaborating with others.

When we sit down to execute on something — we mine our thoughts, and experiences, and translate them visually using tools. All that others see is what ends up on the screen, but what appears on the screen has been something your brain has been designing for quite some time.

Graphic Communication

The Product Design industry has seen several tools for interface design rise and fall in popularity over the past 20 years. We started with wrestling Photoshop’s photography toolset into submission. Then as our profession evolved to be more distinct from visual design, and design trends moved towards flatter, more simplistic interfaces, tools like Sketch for the Mac stepped in with more robust tooling around solving specific interface problems. Today, Figma has stepped into a dominant position with remote team collaboration and large community creating tools and assets for each other. There are at least a dozen other tools in the market now, and certainly more planned for the future.

Mechanics of these tools change in big and small ways from each other, but the goal remains the same – render a visual artifact, that communicates a set of functions and behaviors, to achieve one or more goals.

The core muscle that requires exercise here is Graphic Communication. It is the same ability humans have been exercising since the days of cave paintings. You can measure and critique almost every aspect of a product designers work on their graphic communication. At a minimum, digital products require the designer to communicate goal, function, state, and emotion.

As you design for a product, you can ask yourself these questions:

• What are the goals I’ve communicated to the user?

• What are the functions I’ve communicated to the user?

• What are the states I’ve communicated to the user?

• What are the emotions I’ve communicated to the user?

Some companies attempt to dismiss emotions as important, but here’s the thing – people have feelings – even if you’re creating products designed to be sold to a giant corporation, there’s still a person somewhere along the line of that chain. In my opinion, product designers should mostly ignore when people begin lecturing them on the differences and nuances of B2B (businesses selling products to other businesses) and B2C (businesses selling products to consumers). Until our society aggressively expands into selling to robots or AI, we live in an emotional world, where communication is paramount.

Exercise

It’s natural for every person at the beginning of their product design journey to feel frustrated with their work. When our graphic communication muscles aren’t as strong as our thinking muscles, it’s easy to perceive that gap. If someone asked me to design them a form, or a simple screen for an app — I could have something usable in minutes, but if someone asked me to mold a simple cube from clay, I would find very quickly that my ability to render with clay fails my ability to visualize a simple object. 

You can think of exercising your product design muscles the same way you would a balanced physical fitness routine, if any one muscle becomes too strong or too weak — it has an effect on the surrounding muscles. Product Design requires us to exercise and maintain our design muscles to solve real problems. We need to practice perceiving and critiquing the products and systems we interact with, taking note of how things work, then communicating back to our users how to achieve their goals. If you don’t exercise seeking out new experiences, and taking mental (or physical) notes, and thinking through solutions your design thinking will be basic and uninspired. If you don’t exercise beautiful and thorough graphic communication, using popular tools of the trade, then you’ll find yourself stumbling through menus and buttons, desperately hunting for the function that realizes what’s in your mind. 

Also, like how gym fanatics and marathon runners give account to the high achieved from endorphins released during exercise. You will find, there are similar pleasures to experience from making seemingly disparate connections in your life turn into informed designs for your products.

Finally, there is an additional, difficult mental muscle product designers might also exercise: Not letting constant observation and critique of our world and work lead to the feeling of inadequacy in our ourselves and our lives. But for that, I can only recommend therapy, and keeping healthy relationships.